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Within the cultural Symbolic of a patriarchal society, what choices do women have as subjects? How can a woman oppose patriarchy when, in the phenomenon of what Jacques Lacan in his late work called the forced choice, its very structure readily coopts her opposition? Are all her oppositional choices forced choices? The famous Freudian question, “What does a woman want?” might be better put as “What is a woman to do?” If the historical abuses of women were not enough, then the pervasive double binds within which their actions are caught seem enough to drive women crazy. But is psychosis a choice or, if it is, is it not also a forced choice? We may answer these and other social and political questions in a Lacanian examination of a literary work, Susan Glaspell's “A Jury of Her Peers,” that, though it originally appeared in 1916 (as a play), in the last twenty years has attracted immense scholarly attention because of its combination of a protofeminist perspective and a madwoman whose psychosis leads to an almost archetypal act of murder-as-liberation.1
The madwoman is so common in literature that it has become almost a convention within recent feminist and earlier protofeminist narratives. As the figure of “the madwoman in the attic” attests, women writers have often turned to the literal or figurative psychotic to free themselves of the Symbolic of their times and to change it for later ones. While such figures, as Gilbert and Gubar suggest, may point to the “schizophrenia of authorship” (78), they may also represent a larger political agenda. By making the madwoman a figure of cultural dissidence, women writers have set in motion changes in the cultural Symbolic that may someday produce those different subjects desired by dissidence or rebellion or revolution. Because they deal with social life, realistic stories such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” and Glaspell's “Jury” attest to the social and personal problems attending women who take a dissi